A PERFORMATIVE ONTOLOGY OF CARTOGRAPHY

Author: Mark Denil

Chief Cartographer / Director of Conservation Mapping

Center for Applied Biodiversity Science at Conservation International

I intend to discuss a Performative Ontology of Cartography, and will begin by outlining what is to be understood by this phrase. An ontology is a narrative of being or existence: it can be thought of as a conception of reality. It seeks to describe or posit the basic categories and relationships of being or existence and to define entities and types of entities within the described framework. An ontology of cartography would deal with maps: what a map is, how one would identify the map-ness of a particular thing, and it would identify the quality of map-icity that not only determines whether a particular thing is a map or not, but also addresses the value question: Is it a good map?

There have been many attempts to define a category of things that can be identified as maps. Very often the investigators ground their examinations in a taxonomy. They pigeon-holing things as this type of map or another: topographic or thematic, for instance, or types 1 or 3 (virtual), to take another example. Preceding any of these taxonomies, though, is a basic dichotomous division of all things into things that are maps, and things that are not. This division is commonly not very rigorously examined, yet it underlies all subsequent analysis and is in fact a Procrustean device which predetermines conclusions, whether intentionally or otherwise. It is relatively easy to theorize about maps, if one is able to circumscribe the definition of the map at will; literally cutting inconvenient map-like things out of the theoretical road.

My intention is to examine that initial dichotomous division and to demonstrate that there are clear and unequivocal criteria for deciding map-ness, and that this decidability is central to any valid theory of cartography. Indeed, any theory which does not address that division is seriously flawed.

It is clear that a dizzying array of things can potentially fill the role of map, at a given time and place for a given person. Something can be identified as a map when that thing functions as a map; which is to say that anything that can fill a need for a map, in some situation, to some person, is a map. Any thing that can and that does. A map is what a map does. It is incumbent upon the theorist, therefore, to account for all the many and various things that could potentially fill that role. This might seem a formidable task, but obviously the set of such things cannot be infinite (as might at first appear to be the case), because potential map users are constrained in what they can recognize as potential maps by comparatively well understood mechanisms.

What exactly does it mean to say that a map is what a map does? What it means is that one must reject the notion that there is a transcendent, elemental category of things that are maps. The only test of a map is that it is useful and usable as a map and that it is persuasive of its use and usability as a map. A map is first and foremost a rhetorical argument, often arguing on may planes simultaneously, and its appeal is addressed to the potential user to accept it as a map, and, moreover, as a good map. Obviously, there is no quotient of map-ness that can be slathered over a thing to make it a map. There is no thing that is a map if it is not fit for use as a map, that is not usable as a map, and that cannot appear to be a map to a potential user. Therefore; if it looks like a map, acts like a map, and is accepted as a map, it is a map no matter what it might appear to be to someone else.

Be that as it may, the decision on map-ness is not arbitrary or idiosyncratic. TAlthough the decision on map-ness is made by the reader or potential user, that reader is by his very nature as a reader constrained to identify some things as maps and other things as not-maps. All readers exist as readers only by subscribing to one or more interpretive communities of readers; cultural communities that share broad paradigms of what a map is and how it should function. Now, any particular reader can and likely will belong to a range of different interpretive communities, and these varying memberships will constitute the unique perspective of the reader's judgment of any particular map, but no reader stands apart from her communities. If she did she would not be a reader.

The reader of any text negotiates meaning with the text in the intersection between her assumptions and the features she recognizes and reads into the text. The reader chooses an interpretation that the reader decides the map can fill. Part of the interpretation is not only the assumption of what aspects bear significance, but as well of the means available for coming to grasp that significance. The map, like any text, is a notation which must be unraveled and performed by the reader in order to come into a state of signification. As a notation, as a stage for a performance, it allows the reader to play out the possibilities made attainable by a reader subscribing to the interpretive paradigms tapped by the visual map text. It is in that performance that it becomes a map. We see this performance of notation in other venues as well, such as with music. Alex Waterman noted recently in issue 12 of the magazine Dot Dot Dot that:

A graphic notation describes relationships between things. The notation of music can describe time and mobility, form and function, a prescribed expressivity or an open-ended process. What notation engages is a ‘reading’ that needs witnessing. The audience gathers to witness this reading. 1

That, of course, is with music; usually the audience gathers to perform the map themselves, not just as witness, although gathering to witness a map reading is an interesting notion in itself. I will explore two instances of public, witnessed map performance, but first we should consider how a map performance comes about.

Upon encounter or engagement, and as a part or identifying a thing as a map, the user gropes within it for a narrative, grasping for an argument or an explanation she can apply to a situation she understands or can recognize. The argument or narrative discovered in the map by the user is not necessarily the argument or narrative discovered in that thing by just anyone else, or even the one the map maker thought he was placing there, although it is likely that what is found is quite similar to that discovered by other members of the user's interpretive community. She discovers that which she has been prepared to find by the explanations and expectations introduced to her by culture itself, or through culturally determined mechanisms.

We can observe a demonstration of this groping for narrative through the interpretation of elements embodied and arraigned in a map in Italo Calvino's novella TheCastle of Crossed Destinies. In the castle at least nine stories are related, silently, by the guests and the host: first, by the construction, and, later, by the reinterpretation, of a single pattern of taro cards. Eventually, the entire compendium of stories is mapped in a single constellation. As Calvino writes:

…as one guest is advancing his strip, another, from the other end, advances in the opposite direction, because the stories told from left to right or from bottom to top can also be read from right to left or from top to bottom, and vice versa, bearing in mind that the same cards, presented in a different order, often change their meaning, and the same taro is used at the same time by narrators who set forth from the four cardinal points”. 2

A critical point to remember here is that while Calvino's traveler has placed a construction upon the pattern of cards, and on the order they were laid out or pointed to by the story teller, there is no explanation available to him other than his own interpretation of the cards and the appearance of the story teller. Someone else having taken a very different path through life to the castle would easily have heard nine different stories; the differences being a function of the varied experience and subscription to varied interpretive communities. This is directly analogous to the way we encounter a map; we read into it what we are prepared to understand, part of which may be our thoughts about and expectations of the map issuer.

I believe that we can find another public map performance in the 40 minute film entitled A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist, that the British filmmaker Peter Greenaway made in 1978. Greenaway has said that he had

…always been fascinated by maps and cartography. A map tells you where you've been, where you are, and where you're going - in a sense it's three tenses in one. It's also an amazing ideogram of information that is very useful and, perhaps most pertinently, also not at all useful. 3

Maps, one discovers in the course of this film, are there to be found; as Greenaway's narrator remarks: “I look[ed] for a map in everything I possessed and in most things I didn't possess as well.” 4

One common root for judging a map is the faith a potential user has in the issuer: That authority, however, is many times called into question by the narrator, as with the map that “...was supposed to have been by Erhaus Bewler, but if that's the case then it's a fake. It's obviously more valuable to me as a fake.” 4

It is clear from the narrated map reading that it is the map user that puts the construction upon the map; it is the user that establishes the connection between the map and the landscape and then bases his performance of the map upon that connection:

This is a map made by an exiled pianist, as a directive to the members of his band. He could not foresee that his musical and topographical instruction should be used backwards. As a cartographer, he was not appreciated in his own country.4

Again, while the map maker's intentions can provide a background or context for the reading, that notation remains open to interpretation by the only interpretor that matters: the interpretor of the moment of use, as in the following two maps:

This map, in a sense, was a commission. I'd asked a friend to show me the way from the local railway station to his house. Not content with the few directions he spent some time on a map, filling it out with details that were not strictly necessary for so short a walk. As it happened on that occasion the map proved worthless, because I arrived at the wrong station.

This is a plan from a bogus ecological textbook, called Robinson Crusoe on ConcreteIsland. It shows the water drainage system for an inclined concrete platform. My landscape was not concrete, but the map was invaluable.4

There are many factors at play in a decision about the map-ness of an object, and not all of them are internal evidence of membership in the canon of maps. Sometimes we identify a map because the circumstances of its presentation is consistent with an identity as a map. In other words, we recognize what others treat as a map as having a valid claim to the status of map. Greenaway's narrator notes that the twenty first map was:

The map of a conscientious cartographer. This map had been a legal orthodox buy from an antiquarian's bookshop. It had been kept in a map cabinet. It had been exchanged in daylight for an authorized cheque. There had been a receipt. Yet, for all that I never felt the map was mine. I'd kept it hidden. 4

No matter what our operative definition of the boundary of map-icity, just as we are going to encounter things that are not maps, we are also going to encounter objects that flirt with our decidability boundaries; things that dance on the edge of map and not-map. Again, a decision is made on the map-ness of each candidate item, even when the criteria gets murky.

A map that tried to pin down a sheep trail was just credible. But it was an optimistic map that tried to fix a path made by the wind.

Or a path made across the grass by the shadow of flying birds. 4

Greenaway thus lays out in the course of a 40 minute film a narrated map reading that in the internal time frame of the film is only an instant. The 92 maps the narrator utilizes are quite various; some them might seem to some potential map readers somewhat far fetched as maps. It really doesn't matter, however, if the film viewer completely rejects any or all of the narrators maps as maps. The fact remains that each and every drawing presented must be a map because the narrator accepts each one as a map: it is the narrator's performance of the maps that is central.

We must be careful not to misunderstand what I mean by map use when I say that a map is defined by its use. I do not mean that someone has to physically plan or navigate a journey, or that someone must examine the distribution of hernia in French Second Empire army recruits, or evaluate the balance of trade or the IUCN governance structure. Rather, I mean that a map is used as a map when it recognized as a map. Truth doesn't come into it: perhaps it is accepted as a truthful guide, or perhaps otherwise, but what is important is that it is recognized as a possible guide: a possible map.

It is also important to not be confused by this talk of narrative and argument, and of the primacy of accepted interpretation, into thinking that the narrative need be grounded in only that which is already known and understood. We all know that maps are a prime vehicle for exploration and discovery; but in the end we are only able see what we have learned to see, and we are most likely to discover what we go looking to find. Can we recognize a map in a thing in which there is no narrative, in an empty notation where there is nothing to discover?

The Isles of Langerhans is an example of a map almost without a narrative, without a situation. It very much appears to be a map: it looks like a map, waddles like a map, and quacks like a map, but of what is it a map? It is clearly not a map of the place of its title, and it seems cut off from any even imaginary narrative: it is no more the Isles of Langerhans than it is Shangri-La or Ponario. Like a Cindy Sherman Imaginary Film Still, it is self consciously centered on the trappings of its own identity: it is a map about being identified as a map. Nevertheless, it is as legitimate and as functional and as normative as any map. The outward trappings of the craft of map making are, in this case, leveraged to make an argument not about a situation or narrative, or external relationship, but about the conceptual relationship of this artifact to other artifacts that are seen, maybe less problematically, as maps.

I have attempted to briefly outline an ontological framework for the decidability of map-ness. It seems obvious that no universal or transcendent, elemental category of things that are maps exists. A map is a map solely by virtue of its acceptance as a map (or at least as a potential map) by a potential user. This user is constrained in his or her decision on map-ness by mechanisms built into the cultural framework and paradigms of his or her user community (or communities). The map itself is never more than a notation for a performance and it is in the performance that it becomes a map.

Notes:

1 Waterman, Alex. Res Facta. Dot Dot Dot 12 (presents) p28
2 Calvino, Italo. The Castle of Crossed Destinies. Trans. Weaver, William. Harcourt, Brace & Co: New York 1973 p41
3Greenaway, Peter. A Walk Through H (1978)
accessed: 29 March 2007
4 Greenaway, Peter. A Walk Through H: The reincarnation of an Ornithologist
accessed: 29 March 2007